09/16/2012

Note: I never posted my Spring 2012 papers to this blog - partially because my advisor was in Chicago and London at that time (and now just in London) and preferred to correspond by email, and partially because I wrote a monster two-part paper that's probably publishable at some point and didn't want to post it yet. True, some of my papers here are possibly publishable too, but they're shorter and I'm less likely to expand them into something solid enough for submission to an art journal.

Everything here is licensed under my standard Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license anyway; so viewers are welcome to make use of my papers under those terms. If folks have any questions on this matter, just drop me an email at jpramas [at] lesley [dot] edu.

01/05/2012

My original plan for the Fall 2011 semester in the Art Institute of Boston MFA Visual Arts Program called for me to do a series of photos in the style of Rineke Dijkstra, keep up with relevant readings, write my required five school papers, work with my mentor Matt Gamber on improving my technical mastery of photography, and produce a body of new work by semester's end - including a series of portraits of people of wealthy people on the political left or perhaps scientists working on weapons of mass destruction. Although I followed that plan as best I could, global political developments led to a change in the direction of the photography I ultimately produced for my next residency.

I undertook these assignments in order, and began by following my advisor Ben Sloat's admonition to look at the work of Rineke Dijkstra - notably her Beach Portraits - then figure out how she shot the photos in question, and reproduce her work myself. Upon studying Dijkstra's career at length - and reading various analyses of her work - I discovered that her most famous portraits were done using a single strobe. One of the benefits of living in the early 21st century is that it's possible to find shoot notes for many famous photographers online. And fortunately, Dijkstra was no exception. I was able to find notes on how she organized her shoots, and diagrams of her lighting setup. Realizing that I had very little idea about how to use artificial lighting properly, I enrolled in a five week strobe course that was being run by Art Institute of Boston faculty member Ken Richardson at Camera Eye Workshops in Somerville.

Taking Richardson's class turned out to be a great move. By the end of the first session, I knew what kind of (very economical) strobe I should buy and had a rough idea of how to place a monolight and a reflector to mimic the effect in many of Dijkstra's portraits. Over the coming weeks I did shoots with five models, and emerged with a number of photos that I believe fulfilled the terms of my assignment. The four best shots that I took in Dijkstra's style can be viewed at my new portfolio website. I also emerged from the lighting class with a good deal of practical knowledge about how to use strobes and modifiers on and off camera to significantly improve my photography in dim or dark lighting situations.

However in late September, just as my lighting class started winding down, the Occupy movement got underway - first in New York City and then, within two weeks of its September 17th launch, here in Boston. As a photojournalist and editor of a news weekly devoted to covering the labor and non-profit beats in Boston, I knew it was time to put my publication into overdrive and devoted every resource I had into doing a proper job of covering the emerging social movement. By early October, my staff had doubled to about 12 journalists and photographers, and my weekly had become a daily. For the next six weeks it remained a daily, and I went into high gear to keep up with the furious production schedule the times demanded of me.

By the time the Occupy Boston movement slowed down a bit in November, I had shot about 4,000 photos of the occupiers and their activities, written dozens of related articles, edited dozens more, and even appeared live on Russia TodayAmerica's 5 o'clock news show recounting my impressions of the new movement. All while keeping up with my schoolwork, and running the 2011 Digital Media Conference at MIT and Lesley University.

Given the significant uptick in my photojournalistic practice, Matt Gamber thought that I should build my residency portfolio from my Occupy Boston work rather than attempting to try staged shoots as originally planned. I ultimately agreed that this was a good idea, especially since my fourth school paper had raised some questions about subjectivity in contemporary photography that I realized I could start to address more usefully by looking carefully at my recent photojournalism. In that paper, I had opined that I was seeing a postmodernist subjectivity in the subjects of many works shot by my publication's staff photographers at Occupy Boston events - in the form of placards and banners carried by many occupiers in most of those shots.

Ben Sloat had responded that I could not jump to that conclusion based on a selective sample of the vast number of photos being taken of the Occupy movement globally. His comments impelled me to choose work for review by Matt Gamber from a large number photos of that movement that I took of a variety of human subjects in different situations. Matt ultimately chose 15 photos from the 71 I presented to him for review - all evening or night shots. I noticed that most people in those remaining photos were not carrying placards or banners of any sort, and that I would have to put some more thought into my ideas about subjectivity in photography if I'm going to use such work in my MFA thesis. So, I've started steering my non-directed readings towards doing just that.

In addition to a steady diet of articles and essays recommended by my mentor, advisor and other AIB students, staff and faculty, I read some longer works of art history, art theory and art criticism - including E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art, Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World, Kit White's 101 Things to Learn in Art School, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, and Jean Baudrillard's The Conspiracy of Art. I also began work on György Lukács's Essays on Realism on the recommendation of my friend Prof. Gary Zabel, a philosophy professor at UMass Boston ... after his suggestion that I look at Lukács's concept of realism as a third category of subjectivity in photography that I should consider analyzing along with modernist subjectivity and postmodernist subjectivity.

I concluded the semester by reading a large number of essays on postcolonialism and postmodernism for my upcoming Critical Theory III class with Sunanda Sanyal - which I am looking forward to. And I watched a number of art documentaries including This is Modern Art, Art in the Twenty-First Century, and The Woodmans.

Otherwise, the only other things to report are that I took in a number of museum and gallery shows over the course of the semester, had a studio visit with Edie Bresler - an AIB MFA Visual Arts alumna and Simmons College professor - and had a small text piece in a show by Natacha Sochat at her NBK Gallery in Boston.

I feel it has been a very productive semester overall, although I do hope to use the lighting equipment I bought during my lighting course to do some staged shoots next semester. I have continued keeping a running list of all my artistic ideas, and am keen to try to produce one or more of those ideas in the near future.

11/01/2011

The Transition from Modernist to Postmodernist Subjectivity in Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement and the Occupy Movementby Jason PramasCritical Theory IIBen Sloat1 November 2011

As the Occupy movement - which began several weeks ago with the foundation of a makeshift encampment at Zuccotti Park near Wall St. in New York City by anti-corporate protestors - spreads across the globe, amateur and professional photographers have been documenting its every move. That is unsurprising given that the means to record still images of human events is nearly omnipresent at this moment in history - in the form of cell phones, handheld computers, tablet computers and standalone digital cameras. Most people on the planet either possess a device capable of taking a digital photograph, or can at least borrow one on short notice. And those photos can be uploaded to the internet with great ease, and be seen around the world in minutes.

Most of these photographs are interesting to observers to the degree they provide a window into activities that have just taken place. In the future they will be of less interest because they are largely low-quality images from tiny cell phone cameras, taken by people with no training in photography. Without curation, it may well be impossible to determine what the subject and setting of many such photographs is and their documentary value will thus be much diminished.

But in cities like Boston, MA in the United States - where there are numerous university programs in visual arts, and large numbers of trained photographers - many of the photographs taken of the local branch of the Occupy movement display a high level of technical sophistication and artistry. And are worthy of further examination to decide if any innovations in photographic practice are emerging from the maelstrom of activity in the field.

When attempting to discern interesting developments in the photography of a new period - and its significance - one must inevitably compare it to photography from similar periods in recent history.

Mass movements for social justice like the Occupy movement in a country like the United States are a relatively rare occurrence; so if the project at hand is to compare the documentary photography of the democratic upheaval of the present day to a similar period in recent history, it is necessary to look back half a century to the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s to find a popular struggle with similar characteristics that was heavily covered by the social documentarians of its day.

Among the best known photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is Danny Lyon, a self-taught New Yorker who was paid by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee - the most storied civil rights organization - to document their activities.

As former SNCC leader Julian Bond puts it, “SNCC’s idea of photography was functional: it was to provide pictures for SNCC’s propaganda and for press releases to those papers that would print them, and it was used to illustrate fund-raising brochures and to document the movement. Danny Lyon took this function and made it art.” (Lyon, 6)

For two tumultuous years, Lyon travelled the American South and took photographs - some of which have since become iconic - of SNCC’s many organizing campaigns. He was able to do so because he was a photographer at a moment when social documentary photography was both popular and funded.

As Naomi Rosenblum points out in A World History of Photography

In the 1960s, despite the inroads of film and television documentaries, the still image again came to be seen as a significant element in socially useful programs. Many factors were responsible for the revival of interest in the traditional forms of social documentation. One was the emergence of funding sources both in and out of government. Support from the national and state arts endowments; from private granting bodies such as the venerable John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (which from 1946 on had funded a range of photographic projects); and from banks, economic assistance programs, and labor unions made possible individual and group camera documentation of decaying and regenerated neighborhoods, rural communities, nuclear and other power installations, and the working conditions of industrial and farm laborers. A multiplicity of projects made use of images in conjunction with words in slide talks, exhibitions, and publications.

Another factor in the upsurge of social documentation was the involvement of photojournalists in increasingly volatile sociopolitical situations in America, Africa, and Europe. For instance, Bob Adelman, Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, Danny Lyon, and Mary Ellen Mark were among the photojournalists who covered the civil rights struggles of the 1960s for the press, continued afterward to confront social issues on their own, developing their themes with greater depth than was possible when working on deadline. (Rosenblum, 535-536)

Lyon and many of his contemporaries in and around the Civil Rights Movement were therefore free to develop a significant body of work on their subjects. So much so in Lyon’s case that it is possible to compare several of his works to several works by photographers documenting the Occupy movement in Boston and come up with some useful findings.

Taken as a group, the Lyon photographs are fairly easy to situate. Any observer with a passing knowledge of American history and/or the history of photography can see that the works are all black and white photographs taken during the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s in the American South. The shots of well-dressed African-American and white young people at a lunch counter, or in a jail, or being arrested by police in the midst of a demonstration, or in a church all speak to that place and time.

The fact that Lyon’s work is faithful to the “straight photography” of the mid 20th Century United States - no-nonsense documentary photographs - helps situate his images even more accurately.

But there’s something else much more interesting that Lyon’s Civil Rights Movement photographs have in common. His human subjects are almost the only things in shot. There are very few easily visible words or graphics in his pictures of people. Beyond a sense of the interior or exterior setting, one sees only the subjects - in groups and individually. There are - in postmodern terms - almost no signs in his works, no signifiers in his works, other than the signifiers that his subjects represent.

And that tells viewers that Lyon’s works are modernist works. They were produced during a period when photographers believed that it was possible to lay bare the real essence of a subject in a photograph. And that if a subject was captured in a photograph, then that subject was definitely present in the place and time when the photograph was taken - and therefore a photograph was the ultimate historical document, and the best possible tool for a documentarian.

Roland Barthes discusses this belief in a passage in Camera Lucida, “... I had to conceive, and therefore if possible express properly (even if it is a simple thing) how Photography’s Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it … in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.” (Barthes, 76)

So there was no need for any text, sign or signifier to be in shot in Lyon’s photographs to achieve his purpose of documenting the Civil Rights Movement. As long as he was present in the right place and at the right time, and took pictures of the SNCC organizers and their opponents, that was all that was required.

But the works being produced by photographers attempting to document the Occupy movement in Boston at the time of this writing are already showing that much has changed in photography over the last 50 years. And for its subjects too.

When surveying works produced by photographers for Open Media Boston* - one of the handful of news organizations that are regularly covering the new social movement - these changes are immediately visible. But they are not simply the kinds of formalistic changes that one would expect with advances in technology.

First, most photographers documenting the Occupy movement in any kind of deliberate way are not being paid to do so. They are volunteers and it remains to be seen how long they will think it is important for them to continue the work they’ve started. It’s hard to imagine most of them dedicating the kind of time that paid photographers like Lyon were able to spend on their documentary projects in the America of the 1960s.

Second, the new photographs are being produced by a generation of highly educated and formally trained photographers that are influenced by postmodernism - not modernism.

Third, their subjects are also influenced - whether they realize it or not - by postmodernism. As such, neither the photographers nor the subjects believe in the idea of a subject in modernist terms. And they absolutely do not believe that images of a subject are accurate reflections of some “truth” - psychological or otherwise - of that subject.

That is to say, they approach the idea of a subject in Baudrillardian terms. There are no subjects. There are only simulacra of subjects. Representations of subjects. Or in this case, subjects acting as they believe subjects should act.

To modernists of the 1960s, the “I” of a human subject was knowable and that “I” could be accurately represented by photography. To postmodernists of the early 21st century, the “I” of a subject is unknowable by any means and can never be knowable.

In this frame, we live in an age of hyperreality. Where reality is constructed by media makers like photographers. Where simulations that contain only an element of a given reality, stand in for that reality. And that this state of affairs is inevitable because reality cannot ever really be known. At least as long as we live under capitalism (which alienates commodities from their raw materials, exchange value from commodities, and workers from the products of their labor), urbanism (which alienates people from the natural world), and contemporary media (including photography - which is generally used along with language and ideology to keep elites in power that benefit from all this confusion).

As Baudrillard states in Simulacra and Simulation, “... the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials … It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double … A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary …” (Baudrillard, 2)

Put bluntly, in this age everyone expects that photographers manipulate their work in any number of ways before, during and after its production to create their simulation of reality - usually in the service of some powerful entity. And everyone also expects that the subjects of any photograph - or any image - could be anybody … or even an artificial creation … and that a viewer cannot at all assume any truth of any kind about the subjects being represented in any image.

Which goes a long way towards explaining a significant trope that is emerging from the photographs of the Occupy movement. These are not photographs of unadorned human subjects after Danny Lyon et al. No. Instead, they are photographs of subjects holding up handwritten signs that often explain - or purport to explain - their beliefs … or even more pointedly, who they are and why they are part of “the 99 percent.” The mass of regular people that struggle to make a living in an age of growing scarcity caused by the “1 percent” of rich elites that control corporations and governments in profoundly undemocratic ways.

Now why the people holding these signs or the photographers that document them think that anyone will believe that what they have written really expresses their heartfelt beliefs or in any way reflects some personal truth about themselves is an open question.

Perhaps the rise of a social movement calling for democracy and justice is giving people the hope that it is possible to create spaces where images can once again be taken at face value, and that images can in some sense really represent the subjects they are depicting. Hard to say.

Does this then mean that intellectuals inspired by this movement will push past the seemingly inevitable logic of postmodernism to some new - and perhaps more hopeful - theoretical framework? That is also hard to say. But postmodernism is already nearly a half century old itself; so maybe its time for a fresh look at reality and the arts that seek to reflect it.

10/01/2011

An Examination of the Return of Situationist Art Practices in the #OccupyBoston Movementby Jason PramasCritical Theory IIBen Sloat1 October 2011

There are certain times in world history when a movement for human liberation spreads like wildfire across nations. By some metrics, 2011 is proving to be such a year. What began with the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt and Yemen and Syria, spread to Greece and Spain, then to Wisconsin - and now, with the rise of the #OccupyWallStreet movement that launched in New York City on September 17th is now spreading across the United States. Including to Boston - home of the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University - in the form of #OccupyBoston, a highly networked and youthful new movement for democracy that has grown in less than a week from a call by one person on Twitter (@occupy_boston, Robin Jacks) to a dynamic social force that is able to attract over 1,000 people at a time to its new semi-permanent encampment at Dewey Square on the edge of the Financial District.

In his book The Imagination of the New Left, George Katsiaficas, a sociologist at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and student of the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, propounds his Eros Effect theory regarding the social rationale behind such popular upsurges.

Katsiaficas explains the theory in brief on his website, “My own project begins with a very simple proposition: millions of ordinary people, acting together, can profoundly change the basic facts of social life.... If we look at history, we can find other such moments in every country when the activated population changes governments, economic structures-even the way time and space are measured and understood! In these moments of the eros effect, love ties exist between people that are some of the most exhilarating feelings imaginable. I am not talking simply about sexual ties when I say love ties. Love has many forms-love of parents for their children and vice versa, love for brothers, sisters and other family members, love for a significant other, and most socially love for one's fellow human beings. In moments of the eros effect, previously dominant values and norms suddenly are replaced. Competition gives way to cooperation; hierarchy to equality; power to truth.” (Katsiaficas)

Katsiaficas’ primary example of the Eros Effect in operation on a a broader scale was the global movement that was sparked in Paris, France in May 1968, and had a profound liberatory effect on the politics and culture of several nations - including the United States - that lasts to this day. The fact that it is still possible for millions of Americans to participate in a freewheeling bohemian scene, across several subcultures including the “art world” could be said to be a testament to the lasting effects of that movement. Movements like May 1968 are driven by a wavefront of ideas - spread by modern mass communications technology. At that time, the technologies available to grassroots activists were offset printing, photographs, mimeographs, early photocopies, and Super 8mm films. Together with artistic techniques like silkscreening and murals, and including attention eventually received on the mass media of the day - newspapers, magazines, radio and television - certain ideas were picked up, often from sources unknown, and writ large in a matter of hours or days to a waiting global audience.

In a climate where street demonstrations were a daily occurrence - and where a great deal of activity was happening in local universities, cultural institutions, cafes and bars - one major locus of this system of information transmission was the wall poster.

Relatively easy to create and cheap to print, millions of such posters were produced - either by or in concert with artists - that spread key ideas that spoke to the zeitgeist of the period.

The Paris movement in May 1968 produced a large corpus of such posters. One of the most famous was called Sois Jeune et Tais Toi [Be Young and Shut Up]. (Anonymous)

The inspiration for such work came directly from the political and artistic movement known as the Situationist International - itself descended from the Lettrist movement in France in the 1950s, and from the earlier Surrealist movement. The philosophical lineage of the Situationists was Libertarian Marxism, a strand of Marxism that holds the strong belief that capitalism can only be overthrown by free individuals acting collectively in a culture of mutual aid and solidarity - not by state-driven communist bureaucracies like the Soviet Union (a nation that Situationists believed had betrayed both socialism and democracy) .

Artistically, the Situationists developed a technique called détournement that could be used across media. One way to describe the idea of détournement would be an ironic repurposing of government and corporate propaganda tropes in the service of human liberation and against the commodification and bureaucratization of human existence by those forces (a process the Situationists called the Spectacle).

Simon Ford, in his book The Situationist International: A User’s Guide, quotes the Situationist International’s definition of détournement circa 1958 as being the “détournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of present and past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense, there can be no situationist art or music, but a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.” (Ford)

The Situationist idea of détournement clearly inspired later postmodernist artworks that made use of existing art created for advertisers and governments, and repurposed them in an ironic fashion. However, the Situationists were always primarily interested in using their work of détournement as a political weapon. Not just a as a way to make people think randomly interesting thoughts or to “Think different” as as fin de millennium advertising campaign would have it.

And détournement also applied to reworking ideas present in the culture into new forms of art - which would later be echoed in the present day “remix culture” and into conceptual art in general from the 1960s onwards.

Naturally, since it was the Situationists who read the atmosphere of youth rebellion against capitalism, the traditional communist responses to capitalism, and government repression most accurately in the France of the late 1960s, it was also they whose ideas resulted in a number of local uprisings among students that spread into a national and then global revolt against corporate and government elites.

So it comes as no surprise that their ideas inspired a great number of young political artists - les engagés in the parlance of the times - to create a huge number of posters and other artworks that mocked corporate and government propaganda.

Sois Jeune et Tais Toi is a simple one-color hand-crafted silkscreened poster. It was printed in a variety of different sizes and colors in large numbers in 1968, and on various kinds of paper. Its creator is unknown - reflecting both the collective nature of the liberatory movements of that time, as well as Roland Barthes’ then-recent postmodernist idea of “the death of the author.” In the sense that the message of the print has essentially nothing to do with its author or authors. It reflects the spirit of the times. The print shows the image of a teenager in front of the silhouette of the dictatorial French President Charles DeGaulle. DeGaulle is covering the teenager’s mouth with one hand. And the eponymous legend is printed to the left of the images. The meaning would have been crystal clear to any young person in France - and beyond. “Whatever you are told about your freedoms in advertising and government propaganda, you have none.” With the implied subsidiary message, “what are you going to do about it?”

Fast forward to Boston of late September 2011, and we find that a new generation is rising up angry in much the same fashion as their predecessors. The aforementioned #OccupyBoston movement has also taken to distributing posters. But this time not just for use on walls, but for use in the modern digital agora that have largely taken the place of physical spaces as a means of grassroots communication. The main distribution point for these new posters is Tumblr - and from there other social media like Twitter and Facebook. And, as it happens, the new movement has already produced a poster, that is strikingly similar to - if not directly inspired by - Sois Jeune et Tais Toi, called Shut Your Mouth. (Anonymous)

As with Sois Jeune, Shut Your Mouth has been produced by an anonymous creator or creators. And as before, this creator is clearly part of the new liberatory movement. Shut Your Mouth is a more complicated work than Sois Jeune graphically - largely because it encourages a particular action. But it is an exemplar of the type of work being produced by similar movements around the world at the time of this writing. The graphic is a digitally produced image, black on white. It is dominated by the silhouette of the head of a young person. The top of the head has been replaced by the Boston skyline. Where a mouth should be there is a white X, and the words “Occupy Boston” replace the eyes and nose. On the top of the graphic there is a legend reading “Everything is great. Go home and shut your mouth.” On the bottom it reads “Occupy Boston is speaking out 6 pm Friday Dewey Square By South Station T #OccupyBoston www.occupyboston.com” The bottom part can easily be redone to push future actions.

Shut Your Mouth gives lie to the many promises of freedom mouthed by contemporary commodity society from Nike ads to Obama speeches, and shows that at least a significant subset of contemporary youth no longer believe corporate and political propaganda, and are now using art and détournement as a political weapon once again.

When this trend will blossom into a full-fledged cultural revolution is difficult to say at this early juncture. But it certainly looks like it might happen soon. Young people - and many people of all ages - are angry about a world run (and being run into the ground) by elites, and seem increasingly willing to join social movements in the service of democracy, social justice and human rights. These developments will doubtless become the subject of a great deal of academic research in the years to come.

09/01/2011

When a photographer purposely strips away the artifice from a portrait photograph, what is left for the viewer to apprehend? A person against a simple background. Few or no objects in shot. Few visual cues. Little that speaks of a person’s background and station in life. Just a subject. And if the photographer is a practitioner of the deadpan aesthetic, the subject will usually not be posed in a formal way. There will be no makeup or bespoke costume. What one sees will be - in a sense - what one gets. Then the viewer and the photographer are left with a question … is the subject just a representative of a universal category, or does each subject’s individuality shine through?

For the 20th century German photographer August Sander, the answer was the former. According to art historian Robert Kramer, “Sander’s particular mission was to reveal how the collective power of human society, social class, cultural niveau, among other factors, produce group similarities and common types of appearances.” (Sander, 19) More an archivist - or perhaps the ultimate documentarian - than an artist, Sander took photographs of large numbers of people from all walks of life, then arranged them in categories by occupation, social class, and other metrics for presentations in books (not galleries, contemporary commentators are quick to note).

A cursory look at one of Sander’s best known portraits, Young Soldier, Westerwald, seems to affirm that the photographer’s intent was successfully carried out. Not only is the subject photographed in a very straightforward fashion - reminiscent of the work of the New Objectivity movement that influenced Sander and of the deadpan aesthetic that was inspired by it - but also the fact that the soldier is wearing a uniform would tend to lend credence to the idea that the solider is meant to represent a mass of similar people. A type.

But for the contemporary Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, the subject always breaks free of the artist’s intent. And the particular tends to emerge from the universal. “I’m always looking for subjects that have something universal about them, certain experiences that everyone knows well. But at a certain point in photographing or filming, you’ve also got to be specific, to look at what distinguishes people from each another [sic]. And that’s often small details, an attitude or a gesture.” (Roodenburg, 24)

So her intent has been to remove all but the essentials from each of her major works, and let the viewer see her subjects in times of transition. For over 20 years, Dijkstra has therefore focused on the most universal time of transition in the lives of human beings - adolescence - with numerous series of photographs taken in several countries. She has covered a number of different themes, and occasionally taken pictures of the same people over years starting in early childhood, but she has always returned to candid portraits of teenagers on the brink of adulthood as her overarching project.

A decade ago, Dijkstra went to Israel and took a series of portraits of a particularly difficult group of subjects, teenagers about to do their mandatory military service with the Israel Defense Forces. The teens were male and female and their photos were taken in two different kinds of situations. Some - all boys - were taken after a live fire shooting exercise on the Golan Heights. And some - mostly girls - were taken the day they were inducted into the IDF and then again up to 8 months later.

Two of this last set, the before and after pictures of a young Israeli woman named Eygenya act as a fine introduction to Dijkstra’s general strategy, and a gateway to a critique of that strategy. The two photographs were subsequently displayed as a diptych, and are meant to be viewed together. Like virtually all of Dijkstra’s photographs, they are shot on a 4x5 field camera with a standard lens and tripod, (Jaeger) and she has the color negatives developed and printed as C-Prints in Germany. (Dijkstra)

In the first picture of the diptych, Eygenya, Induction Center Tel Hashomer, Israel, March 6, 2003, the viewer sees a teenage girl filling the center of the frame. She is standing in front of a featureless white wall. It is very difficult to tell who she is or where she is. Classic Dijkstra so far. From her dress - a simple black sleeveless pullover (all we can see since the shot is from the waist up) - and her nosestud - a viewer might guess that she is from Europe or America or some country influenced by those places. Eygenya wears little makeup. Her hands - out of shot - are in front of her body, possibly clasped. She looks tired, and may not have slept at all the night before. She also looks worried. Unsure. Her hair is worn down. Her shoulders curve downwards. She seems resigned to whatever is coming next, but not happy about it. She is trying to smile a bit, but doesn’t seem able to pull it off. Whether this is cultural or not, the viewer can’t tell. She looks directly at the camera, the catch light from a flash reflected in her pupils. But she doesn’t blink at the light.

In the second picture, Eygenya, North Court Base Pikud, Tzafon, Israel, December 9, 2003, the viewer is provided with more visual cues. The subject is now in a military uniform. Viewers familiar with the world’s militaries will instantly recognize the uniform as Israeli - which situates the subject geographically. Eygenya now looks more self-assured. Her half-smile is more sincere. She still looks tired, but it is a tiredness more likely due to the physical exertions of basic miltary training than to worry. Her hair is tied back to keep it out of the way for her duties, but still kept long … indicating that the IDF is still insistent on maintaining clear gender boundaries. Though Eygenya allows two strands to hang down stylishly, and still wears the same eye makeup and lipstick she wore in the first photo. Her stance is self-assured, even cocky. Her hands are now folded behind her back - indicative of a military parade rest stance, though she seems to be leaning on one foot. She has matured, and may be more sexually active than she was in the first photo. Her olive green shirt is open to reveal the chain of her dog tags and a white undershirt. She still stares straight at the camera, but in a less insistent manner than the first photo - to which is it otherwise identical aside from a slightly bluer cast to the background. Perhaps due to different lighting.

So Dijkstra has seemingly achieved her goal of showing a human being in a transition from adolescence to adulthood in her diptych of Eygenya. Which makes sense as that is what she has become noted for doing.

Yet an additional question - famously raised by Abigail Solomon-Godeau - is then surfaced. Although Dijkstra, and other photographers that have inspired her like Sander and Diane Arbus, have done their best to photograph people as they find them in the world, do they not still mask their subjects?

Solomon-Godeau in her essay "Who is Speaking Thus?" said

… while photographers compose and organize their images to yield certain meanings, rarely is a photograph’s subject neutral or unmarked to begin with. Added to the significance of subject matter on the level of denotation and connotation, and to the significance produced by contextual factors, are those elements supplied through mechanisms internal to the apparatus which also serve to structure meaning. These mechanisms in and of themselves produce certain effects, perhaps the most important one in photography being Barthes’s ‘reality effect.’ In part, this derives from the fact that photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself. We know the photographer had to have been on the scene - indeed, this serves as a further guarantee of the image’s truth - but the photographer is manifestly absent from the field of the image. Instead, we are there, we are seeing what the photographer saw at the moment of exposure. (Solomon-Godeau, 180)

Here it is worth considering Dijkstra’s Eygenya diptych in tandem with Sander’s Young Soldier, Westerwald, and think about both works in light of Solomon-Godeau’s critique.

Dijkstra’s and Sander’s stated intentions are different. Dijkstra wants to show individuality emerging from universality. Sander wanted to show essentially the obverse. Yet the two photographers show elements of both individuality and universality in their portraits of young soldiers. Sander was no fan of the Nazi regime in the Germany of 1945 when he took the shot of the young soldier. His son, after all, was put in prison for a decade by the Nazis for being a communist revolutionary and died there in 1944. But he absolutely humanizes the young solider in his portrait. It could not be otherwise. That young man may have been a soldier, and therefore a universal type, but he was his own person, too. And that subject’s personality is quite present in the photograph - taken shortly before the Germany Army was defeated and dismantled by the advancing American, British, French and Russian allies.

Dijkstra, for her part, discussed the Israeli photos at some length in a video interview done for Tate Britain in 2003

I was invited by a museum to do an exhibition over there and I visited them. And then the sister of a friend had to go to the army the next day, and I realized what a prominent role the army plays in their society. And then I you know, because I already dealed [sic] a lot of with uniforms, but this was a kind of different situation because it will be a war situation. And I was interested in how people deal with the situation. And I felt that military service implies that somebody has to submit to a collective identity. I thought there was always a tension between the values of the individual against the values of the community. And I was interested in this paradox. (Dijkstra)

And here we arrive at a quandary. It is considered highly inflammatory to compare the conduct of the German Army in World War II with the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces - primarily because most of the Jewish people in Europe were slaughtered in a genocide perpetrated by the same Nazi regime that commanded the German Army between 1933 and 1945. And Israelis and the global Jewish community at large are understandably sensitive about being linked with their historic oppressors.

However it is difficult to accept humanizing soldiers in militaries that participate - as most militaries do - in human rights violations on an ongoing basis. Because in doing so, the photographer in question - regardless of what school or style they represent, and often quite independent of their stated intent - is exercising their power to choose for the viewer what subjects they will see and what frame they will see them in ... in a limited, propagandistic and even censorious way. If they don't at least make some attempt to portray the victims or opponents of said militaries in a similar light. And although contemporary audiences tend not to believe that all photographs represent the unvarnished truth, they still tend to take photographs as they are presented.

So by humanizing individual members of militaries that make the choice to participate - and therefore support, directly or indirectly - human rights violations against innocent people, they are offering the viewer a highly biased and flawed view of the individual subject, the institution they represent, and the political context surrounding both.

It can be viewed as inappropriate for Sander to have presented the young German solider as a representative of a type - at the moment in history that he chose to do so - just as it may also be considered unfortunate that Dijkstra chose to use her privileged position as an internationally-known artist to humanize members of a military that has drawn global condemnation for its treatment of a subject people, the Palestinians, at the behest of a series of like-minded national governments.

If Dijkstra had chosen to do similar portraits of young Palestinians before and after joining their national police force or a militia group - or at least of Israeli refuseniks (Israelis that refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) - then perhaps there would be little to criticize. But as things stand, Dijkstra has chosen to mask her apparently uncritical stance towards the Israeli military in the bland language of artistic choice.

08/01/2011

My second Art Institute of Boston MFA Visual Arts residency in June was quite a bit different from the first one. Hard to believe that there were only five months between the two. In my January residency, I was new not only to AIB but to the art school scene in general. I won’t say I was completely bereft of knowledge about visual arts and the art world, but I had basically no formal training in the arts. So everything was eye-opening and exciting. In my second residency, I had worked very hard to to get myself up to speed technically and academically during the Spring semester. My artwork improved a good bit and my understanding of art history and art theory leaped forward. In addition, I had gotten to know quite a few people at AIB, curated my first group show with several of my peers, and worked with the AIB administration to put on a presentation on art in virtual worlds during the latest residency. Building those personal relationships with students, staff and faculty made the whole experience much more relaxing - although just as fulfilling as the first residency, if not more so.

I once again had two lecture classes: Critical Theory II with Michael Newman, and Creativity, authenticity and the art worker – from post-fordism to immaterial labor with visiting lecturer Fia Backstrom. Newman’s course focused on the archive as the backbone of modernist political organization - and ultimately artwork - and then delved into contemporary postmodernist artistic responses to that now traditional method of organizing information and society. The subject matter was the kind of information I’ll keep filed away in the back of my brain in case I ever have need of it, but it was Newman’s lecture style that made the class worth taking. He was really funny and encouraged us to find clever ways of making use of archives in class assignments.

Backstrom’s course title caught my attention when I was choosing my elective earlier in the spring because she touched upon a major interest of mine intellectually and politically. That is, what is a worker in contemporary labor markets that are being returned to 19th century conditions by triumphalist capitalist worldwide? Are all workers traditional industrial and agriculture workers? Or are more and more purely symbolic workers? If the latter is true, how can symbolic workers organize themselves collectively to fight for their labor rights while maintaining their individuality and creativity?

But the way Backstrom chose to grapple with these topics surprised me. We spent much of the class time redesigning the anti-capitalist game Class Struggle - originally created in the 1970s by New York University professor and noted Marxist intellectual Bertell Ollman. With helpful direction and intervention from Backstrom, our class did indeed manage to create a new game called Art Fight using Ollman’s game as a template. Conceptualizing the board spaces, game cards and character classes proved to be an excellent pedagogical tool. The readings we were assigned were useful for both sparking class debate and for the purposes of game design. Probably the most difficult part of that process was determining the different factions in the art world. For example, we had to decide if curators and gallerists were allies of artists or collectors. We also had answer tough questions like: is it possible to conceive of artists as workers in the Marxian sense. Or not. In our last class, we were able to alpha test the game, and even talk about getting the game produced for real. All in all, a unique experience and at no way the kind of stand-up lecture most students had been expecting. A socialist herself, Backstrom made the entire class into an exercise in collective learning - something I’d like to see more of in American higher education.

Moving on to my critiques, I thought that the messages I received from students (Al Nakas, Melanie Carr, Michelle Chandon, Michelle Saffran, Rita Koehler, Rita Maas, and Jarrod Staples) and faculty (Ben Sloat, Fia Backstrom, Jane Marsching, Jan Avigkos, Oliver Wasow, and John Kramer) alike were much more consistent at this residency overall. In my first residency, I came away with the feeling that there would never been agreement between any two people critiquing my work - because critiquing is such a subjective activity. But this time, I started hearing the same assertions from a number of different people. Namely, that I had proved that I had technical chops as a photographer and that it was time to start producing series of photographs on related themes. That first was perhaps an obvious thing to say since most of the 17 works I presented did not relate to each other, but were meant as a sampler of the different kinds of photography I had been working on. However most of the crits I received indicated that my shots of people are strong overall and that I should focus more on them - which jived with opinions I’ve heard from quite a few non-artists. And they further thought that I should use my political beliefs to my advantage and allow them to come out more directly in the overarching themes I choose for my work this semester. In addition, some people - notably Marsching - were very interested in the augmented reality and virtual reality work I presented during the residency, and thought that I should find more ways to develop that side of my artwork and integrate it with my photography.

At the conclusion of the residency, I developed my semester plan with my new advisor Ben Sloat. He suggested that I ask Matt Gamber of Harvard University and AIB to be my mentor, feeling he would be a good person to push me towards technical virtuosity; so I’m working on setting that up. We agreed that I would continue my study of art history. He also assigned me a number of books to read. On the artwork front, we came to an easy accord that I should spend the first part of the semester trying to reproduce a couple of famous photo sets by Rineke Dijkstra and Jeff Wall - a exercise that will continue moving me towards a skill level where I will be able to get any kind of shot I can dream up that my equipment is capable of producing. Following that exercise, I am going to do at least one series of portraits of people that are in interesting and contradictory positions - people at MIT that help design weapons of mass destruction, local left-wingers who are also wealthy, corporate leaders from companies that are often protested by labor unions, environmentalists and other social movements. The idea is to present work that will force viewers to think about various tensions embodied by the people in the photographs and perhaps draw certain political conclusions about them based primarily on looking at their images. Having talked to one wealthy left-winger about the project already and getting a politely negative response, I’m currently leaning towards focusing on the MIT weapons makers. But we’ll have to see.

Sloat was also interested for me to pursue integrating work in augmented reality with my photography. He also looked at my desire to produce at least one video this semester with favor. And I'm to continue learning Photoshop and digital printing.

In closing, I’m anticipating another busy semester. And one in which I’m still being encouraged to “play” the way I was last semster, but am also expected to start to focus my artwork and papers in a direction which will at least point to my MFA thesis. Having relaxed a bit in July (meaning I primarily did “work work” rather than schoolwork), I guess I’m ready to put nose to academic grindstone once again and move forward toward the next plateau of artistic experience.

05/10/2011

The Counter-Propaganda of John Heartfieldby Jason PramasCritical Theory IJohn Kramer10 May 2011

It is perhaps a bit provocative to speak of any of the work of the photomonteur John Heartfield as counter-propaganda. He was, after all, an early member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and did many of his most famous photomontages for the Communist Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated News - AIZ). However, as Sabine Kriebel points out in New German Critique, “The AIZ was communist in its orientation but not directly affiliated with the KPD, answerable instead to Moscow’s Communist International. This subtle distinction was one that Willi Münzenberg, the AIZ’s publisher, was careful to underscore, because it allowed the AIZ relative independence in Germany.” (Kriebel, 55-56)

It is therefore critical to look at the position of the German Communists broadly and of AIZ in particular to determine whether or not Heartfield’s work could be called propaganda by virtue of his lifelong political stance. Regarding AIZ it’s clear that they had a broad left-wing outlook on politics and a concomitantly broad - and large - readership, “The AIZ was a leftist alternative to the illustrated magazines, or Illustrierten, flooding the German market during the 1920s. With a print run of nearly five hundred thousand, it was the second most popular Illustrierte in circulation, outsold only by the left-of-center Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (sic), whose readership extended into the millions.” (56)

But the publication was not merely a mouthpiece for the Soviet Union or the KPD, “Geared toward a broad-based, left-wing readership, the purpose of the AIZ was to propagate a communist viewpoint to nonparty members and the so-called homeless Left. Its brilliance lay in its ability to speak to the broad spectrum of Lefts during the Weimar Republic, many of whose members felt disenfranchised by both the radical KPD and the more moderate Socialist Party.” (57)

So AIZ was independent of the Communist Party of Germany. Obviously, the party itself never succeeded in taking state power despite significant public support. And it was crushed entirely once Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party took over the country in 1933. Given this state of affairs, Heartfield’s position as an artist working for a publication of the broad political opposition seems far from propaganda - understood as a practice undertaken from a position of state or ruling class power.

The classic definition of propaganda comes from the seminal book of the same name by the American publicist and conservative propagandist Edward Bernays,

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” (Bernays, 37-38)

Bernays himself worked for the American government and major corporations for his entire career. His idea of democracy seems more akin to Plato’s Republic than democracy as most contemporary observers understand it - unsurprising, given that his crowing achievement was helping the United States to install a friendly dictatorship in Guatemala in 1954. His views speak of those who produce propaganda having in mind the control of societies through the manipulation of information.

A view in opposition to that propaganda model has been oft-expressed by the left-wing linguist and social critic Prof. Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “The right way to do things is not to try to persuade people you’re right but to challenge them to think it through for themselves. There’s nothing in human affairs of which we can speak with very great confidence. Even in the hard natural sciences, that’s largely true. In the case of human affairs, international affairs, family relations, whatever it may be, you can compile evidence and you can put things together and look at them from a certain way. The right approach, putting aside what one or another person does, is simply to encourage people to do that. In particular, you try to show the chasm that separates standard versions of what goes on in the world from what the evidence of the senses and people’s inquires will show them as soon as they start to look at it.” (Barsamian, 145)

When looking at the work of John Heartfield from the 1930s, it’s evident that it has much more in common with Chomsky’s view than Bernays’. Most especially in the photomontages he produced for AIZ during that period. And despite achieving fairly early fame through the robust left-wing German press of the 1920s and 1930s, Heartfield remained the rebel and outsider he had been in his youth. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if the Germany’s government had gone left instead of right at that time. But that was not how things played out. One could certainly state that the communist definition of propaganda - the act of promulgating the party’s views through various media - in the period would include work like Heartfield’s, but that same work would generally be considered social satire or op-ed artwork or just PR today. Not propaganda in the negative sense and certainly not in the classic sense. For social justice activists, democrats and “just plain folks,” it would be considered the reverse of propaganda. And its potential antidote … counter-propaganda.

And Heartfield himself would be not be viewed as a propagandist, but as a working-class artist with a wry wit trying his best to stop the rising tide of fascism in his homeland. In our time, he would likely be some kind of unaffiliated radical. But he did not live in our time.

John Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin in 1891 - the son of Franz Herzfeld, a Socialist poet and dramatist and Alice Stolzenberg-Herzfeld, a textile worker and trade unionist. The family was of Jewish extraction. After being driven out of Germany due to Franz being brought up on blasphemy charges, the family was then expelled from Switzerland and abandoned Helmut and the other Herzfeld children in Austria - where they were raised by village burgomaster (Mayor) in Aigen. Helmut insisted on being a Protestant while the other children were raised Catholic. He left school in 1905, and was briefly apprenticed to a bookseller before working in the studio of the painter Hermann Bouffier. He was accepted to the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Munich in 1909 and graduated in 1912. He designed his first book jacket that same year. He then moved to Berlin and studies at the Handwerkerschule (Arts and Crafts School) in 1913. In 1915, he evaded military service in World War I and met George Gross. In 1916, he made his first major political statement by adopting the name John Heartfield in opposition to an anti-British campaign by the German government. Gross then changed his name to Georg Grosz (and later George Grosz). In 1917, he founds the radical magazine Neue Jugend (New Youth) with his brother Wieland Herzfelde (who had also recently changed the spelling of his name). He joined the newly-formed Communist Party of Germany in 1918. He cofounded the Berlin Dada group in 1919. (Heartfield, 134-136)

After that followed a long series of successes and participation in left-wing artists organizations - culminating in a long trip to the Soviet Union in 1931-1932. In 1933, he fled to Czechoslovakia - one step ahead of the SS. AIZ also moved abroad and continued to publish in exile during that period. In 1934, he was stripped of his Germany citizenship. In 1938, he was forced to flee to London after Hitler demanded his extradition back to Germany. He returned to East Germany in 1950 where he lived until his death in April 1968 - ironically only a few days before a global left-wing youth rebellion swept Europe and much of the world. (136-138)

Importantly, for the purpose of discussing his work as a photomonteur, Heartfield is often credited with being one of the inventors - and possibly the sole inventor - of the photomontage technique which Maria Gough addresses in New German Critique, “Assertions abound on this front, beginning with the invention of photography about 1839, but in the early twentieth century it was the Berlin Dadaists (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, along with Heartﬁeld and George Grosz) who took credit based on their respective encounters during World War I with the souvenirs and correspondence of German soldiers, which were laden with photographic fragments.” (Gough, 136)

Peter Selz in an essay in Photomontages of the Nazi Period expands on the idea of the art form’s genesis in a grassroots “DIY” practice during WWI and Heartfield role in its development, “Originally, it seems that soldiers on the Western Front, unable to get their reports of butchery past the censors, turned to pasting together photographs and cutouts from illustrated papers to tell their tale of horror to their families and friends back home. Using this ingenious technique, as well as the collage of the cubists, Heartfield and his close friend George Grosz invented the new technique of photomontage.” (Heartfield, 7)

Heartfield became known as the standard bearer of photomontage in Germany - and non-Soviet Europe in general - as differentiated from the practice of photomontage in America and in the Soviet Union. His style - and the style of many fellow European pioneers of the art form - was often satirical. He mocked entrenched business interests and the politicians that supported them. He constantly and cleverly inveighed against racism, anti-semitism, nationalism and capitalism. As the Nazi Party moved to the national stage and began escalating their violent campaign against the Communists in the streets of Berlin and other German cities - with open support from various regional and national governments - following the start of the Great Depression in 1928, they became Heartfield’s main foil. And most dangerous foe. He was also unsparing in his criticism of the Socialist Party (SPD) - the German equivalent of the Democratic Party in the United States - for selling out to capitalist parties and the Nazis.

In his 1930 work, Wer Bürgerblätter Liest Wird Blind und Taub (Those Who Read Bourgeois Newspapers Will Become Blind and Deaf), he criticizes the SPD newspapers Vorwärts and Tempo with a photomontage of the upper torso of a man in a work shirt and suspenders. The place where the man’s head would be is covered up by superimposed images of issues of the two newspapers positioned to resemble a head. The image includes a block of text in its lower right hand corner that says “Away with these debilitating bandages!” - indicating that anyone who reads publications that side with the SPD’s accommodationist position to the Nazi Party and the traditional German ruling class is effectively disabled by them. (Heartfield, 33)

It’s worth noting that Heartfield was “predominantly” a cut-and-paste photomonteur, “assembling photographic fragments on the worktable rather than in the darkroom” - although he would later turn to the latter style. (Gough, 137) He would take photos of people, places and objects, cut them out, rearrange them to fit his purposes, and photograph the result. He would also appropriate photographs he found in newspapers and magazines for his photomontages. And since he also worked as a designer and typographer, he developed the practice of adding text to his works early on.

As the Nazis got more and more powerful, his works focused squarely on their pernicious program and its negative effect on the nominally democratic Germany of the early 1930s. Many of these pieces - including several of his best known works - derided Adolf Hitler.

His Adolf, Der Ubermensch: Schluckt Gold und redet Blech (Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk, 1932) shows a stock photo of Hitler from the waist up with his torso replaced by an X-Ray view of a human ribcage. Heartfield then placed a picture of a stack of coins where the spine should be - and rested it on a bed of coins at his midsection. Instead of a heart, Hitler sports a white swastika. Below that, the Iron Cross he won during World War I is in view. The resulting image is unambiguous - Hitler is paid off by rich and powerful interests to spew hatred, sow confusion and ultimately rule on behalf of those interests. (Heartfield, 43)

Once the Nazis took over Germany, Heartfield continued a campaign of ceaseless counter-propaganda from exile - with both AIZ and its successor publication Die Volks Illlustriete in Prague, and finally Paris where it folded in 1938. Probably his best known work is a technically masterful 1935 composition called Hurrah, die Butter ist alle! (Hurrah, the Butter is all gone!). The photomontage shows a German family included a wife, son and father seated at their dinner table - which is covered with guns and ammunition. At the front left of the table is a baby carriage containing a baby and another gun. Directly in the front of the table on the floor is a dog in front of a giant screw and lug nut. The entire family - dog included - are trying to eat the metal objects. Behind the table is a wall featuring swastika covered wallpaper and a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler. A framed Nazi slogan, and a pillow sporting the likeness of the puppet German President von Hindenburg completes the tableau. On the bottom of the image is text - including the title phrase and the words “Goering in his Hamburg speech: ‘Iron has always made a country strong, butter and lard only make people fat.'” (Heartfield, 131)

The piece is cutting in the extreme. It savages the Nazi ideology that was swiftly leading Europe into World War II. But it maintains Heartfield’s much-loved sense of humor in the face of the horror that was already engulfing his homeland and was soon to engulf a good part of the globe.

In the final analysis, there was only so much an artist like Heartfield could do as a counter-propagandist. Following his 1939 London exhibition One Man’s War Against Hitler at the Arcade Gallery, and the entry of England into the war, he found work designing book jackets and illustrations for the London publishers Lindsay Drummond and later Penguin Books until his return to Germany in 1950.

But when it counted, and at great personal risk, he used his skills as a photomonteur in a desperate attempt to change hearts and minds away from support of the Nazis and towards a more humanist government. The contradictions of his support of the Communist movement given, he maintained his independence and unique artistic vision throughout his active career.

Works Cited

Barsamian, David. Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001. Print.

04/07/2011

Photomontage is a technique whose origins date back nearly to the beginning of photography. But it is most closely associated with post-World War I avant-garde artistic movements seeking new methods of creative expression that could make use of the industrial technology of the period - and that were inspired by new insights in politics and the new science of psychiatry. It involves cutting and pasting pieces of photographs (and sometimes other kinds of art) together and either displaying them as is or photographing the result. Thus creating a new work. Digital technology has now made this technique commonplace, but in the 1920s it was an unusual way of producing artistic images.

Man Ray (né Emmanuel Radnitzky) and Alice Lex-Nerlinger (née Alice Pfeffer a.k.a. Alice Lex a.k.a. Alice Nerlinger-Pfeffer) (Lidtke) were two artists who created noted works using the photomontage process. This paper will look at one such work from each artist, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) by Ray and Näherin[Seamstress] (1928) by Lex-Nerlinger, and discuss them in relation to each other.

Although both created photomontages during their careers, Ray and Lex-Nerlinger were from very different backgrounds and affiliated with different movements in the European art scene of the early 20th century. Ray was a Jewish-American who came to bohemian Paris in 1915 fleeing his working-class Philadelphia background - and pressure from his garment worker parents to become an architect. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he fell in with Marcel Duchamp and became part of the Dada movement. Soon after the war, he affiliated himself with the Surrealist movement led by Andre Breton.

Robert Fulford, writing in Canada’s National Post, recently described the difference between the two movements

“Spontaneous, self-mocking and defiant, Dada was an individualistic response to the collective horror of the First World War, which drowned individualism in oceans of blood. Dada was temporary, an explosion rather than a revision of art history. Surrealism took itself more seriously. It illustrated Freud’s discoveries about the unconscious. It tried, earnestly but without much success, to ally itself with what it saw as the oncoming wave of socialism. It was clear to artists, though to few others, that the new politics would need a new art, and Surrealism was ready to play the role.” (Fulford)

Lex-Nerlinger studied at the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts between 1911 and 1916, and married German artist Oskar Nerlinger shortly thereafter. Active in Expressionist circles around the magazine Der Sturm - which her husband later edited - and the International Union of Expressionists, Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivists: Die Abstraken by 1922-1923 (Lidtke) she became a well-known graphic designer and photographer. The couple joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928 and were forced to stop their artwork when the Nazi Party took over the country in 1933. They survived the war and were able to resume their careers after 1945.

Though Expressionism is not generally considered a movement, its style has some elements in common with Dadaism and Surrealism. Its adherents in the visual arts challenged academic traditions in the art scene of the period, worked with wild colors, encouraged the expression of intense emotion, and experimented with themes relating to the unconscious.

Expressionism - especially German Expressionism - though generally left-leaning was more politically diverse than Surrealism

“... German Expressionism is usually equated with communism, but the expressionist ideology fed into a multitude of political standpoints. While the largely Jewish ethnicity of Expressionist artists, for example Carl Einstein, Georg Kaiser, Gunther and Schultze-Naumburg, set it in opposition with the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, the expressionist ideal was no more left wing than National Socialism. In fact, the Expressionist tendency to the extreme, and the desire for a new society, a new goal, and new man, is something the Expressionists had in common with the National Socialism that we now consider right wing.” (Trashface)

Nevertheless, Alice Lex-Nerlinger and her husband were firmly within German Expressionism’s left-wing, affiliated with Constructivism, and committed political activists - unlike Ray, who was never active in politics.

This difference is immediately evident in the two works in question. Le Violon d’Ingres is playful. Näherin is serious. But to get a real sense of how different the works are, it’s worth taking an in-depth look at each one.

Le Violon d’Ingres is a 9 13/16 x 7 5/8 inch gelatin silver print. (The Getty) It features a view of Ray’s favorite model and sometime lover, Kiki, seated nude and facing away from the camera. The only ornament on Kiki’s bare back are two f-holes superimposed to make her look like a violin. It first appeared on the cover of the June 1924 issue of the Surrealist monthly magazine, Littérature.

Herbert R. Lottman writes of the work in the book Man Ray’s Montparnasse, “It’s title, Le Violon d’Ingres, bore a double allusion: a reference to an Ingres nude, and to Ingres’ violin playing. Le Violon d’Ingres also happened to be the familiar French term for ‘hobby.’” (78)

So Man Ray was making a triple entendre with the title - a reference to the 19th century neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (specifically to his 1814 work The Bather), to his hobby, and to the French slang expression for a hobby that was sparked by Ingres. All this wrapped up in an implicit critique of the French tradition of academic painting represented by Ingres.

However, Graham Clark in The Photograph, says there’s more to the work than a verbal pun, “... although the intent is on the ‘play’ on the shape of the violin, that very aspect underlies the way Ray approaches the female form (as it does the view of women in much of Surrealist photography) … the meaning of the image is based on a visual pun - the unexpected juxtaposition of disparate elements - but beneath the humour remains a woman’s face, and it is this that is the object of Man’s playfulness. His chosen name (i.e. Man Ray) was an appropriate choice for the kind of photography he produced.” (195)

Näherin is a 6 7/10 x 4 4/5 inch gelatin silver print. (Art Institute of Chicago) The image is a full view of a seamstress at her sewing machine superimposed over the right half of a close-up view of the seamstress’ smiling face. One is reminded that the humanity of the subject is almost blotted out by the need of souless modern industry for human components. The composition is less abstract than Ray’s work - and indeed the work of many Surrealist photographers - which is unsurprising given that Lex-Nerlinger was connected to the Constructivist movement prominent at that time in the Soviet Union and among many left-wing artists.

But here we find a problem. At least in English, there is very little written about Lex-Nerlinger - and what is in print relates not to Näherin but rather to her poster §218. Atina Grossman writing in New German Critique explains, “In 1931, Alice Lex-Nerlinger graphically represented a particular moment in the history of the working-class struggle during the Weimar Republic. Her §218 is a product of and tribute to a mass campaign during the winter, spring and summer of that crisis year when thousands of women demonstrated in the streets and gathered together in rallies and meeting halls to demand the right to abortion and birth control.” (120)

What is one to make of the fact that - aside from the citations above, a brief reference to Lex-Nerlinger regarding her production of §218 in European Feminisms: 1700-1950 by Karen Offen (305), her even briefer mention in A World History of Photography by Naomi Rosenblum (398) and a couple of other cites on the same topic - there is no evident discussion of Lex-Nerlinger and her work? Older histories and encyclopedia of the arts don’t mention her at all; so one supposes we should be grateful for her inclusion in contemporary histories. Even if three of the four works cited here on Lex-Nerlinger are political science or history publications, not art history. [And forgetting that the Art Institute of Chicago’s online catalog actually lists Lex-Nerlinger as an American, when in fact she remained in East Germany for the three decades of her life after World War II; so poor is the scholarship on her.] (Art Institute of Chicago)

So it seems that sexism in the art world rears its head here once again. A ground-breaking artist basically ignored because she’s a woman.

Man Ray had no such trouble, and his career was not nearly as badly hurt as Lex-Nerlinger’s by the interruption of World War II - although he did have to flee Paris in advance of the arrival of the Germans. Volumes have been written about him. Every important art history compendium discusses him at length.

This is not, of course, to take away from his work - which is certainly worthy of remembrance. But the unequal stature afforded Ray and Lex-Nerlinger does make a scholarly comparison of Le Violon d’Ingres to Näherin more difficult than it should be.

How, then, can one best compare the two works? Perhaps at face value - since we are denied more background information on Näherin.

In that framing, Le Violon d’Ingres is a work that makes no attempt whatsoever to obscure the fact that it was shot from a male perspective and therefore invites the viewer to stand in for Ray’s male gaze at his female model - who is literally presented as an object (albeit an erotic object), not as a person. Now, it is true that Ray’s model Kiki was celebrated as an independent modern woman - and actually crowned “Queen of Montparnasse” at one point for being a notable bohemian and artist in her own right (she was a singer and diarist). But whatever Kiki was as a person, Ray does not allow her humanity to surface in Le Violon d’Ingres.

Näherin is just the opposite. The humanity of the unknown subject - a working woman - is front and center in Lex-Nerlinger’s photomontage. The factory where the woman works clearly tries to submerge her humanity in the service of its capitalist owners - and presumably in the interests of the German state - but her humor and intelligence shine through. Like Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Autoportrait avec deux élèves(1785), we are confronted with a female subject that gazes back at our gaze. That meets our gaze as human being to human being. That is not an object, but a person.

Like all artforms, photomontage is capable of very different kinds of expression in the hands of different practitioners. Both Ray and Lex-Nerlinger were outstanding photographers and innovative artists, and Le Violon d’Ingres and Näherin - taken together - demonstrate just how different the vision of two artists in related artistic movements could be. Both works are excellent representatives of a tumultuous period in art history.

But it remains a pity that we are denied the information necessary to compare the works in all their dimensions because the art world - under pressure from four decades of feminist activism - has only recently begun to find the work of women artists worthy of discussion and debate.

03/01/2011

Reflections on Postmodernism and Role of the Contemporary Artist in Late Capitalist Society by Jason Pramas Critical Theory I John Kramer 1 March 2011

An assignment to discuss our Critical Theory I readings in relation to my work? Well ... in many ways this paper is a comical exercise for me. Every new reading and new body of work that I encounter at this point in my tenure in the AIB MFA Visual Arts program causes me to conceptualize new potential directions for my work. For what is my work at this point after all? It is largely a group of photos taken in my role as a photojournalist - mixed with a growing number of experiments where I'm trying to "get" certain kinds of shots. Just to do it, and having done it, to expand my knowledge of photography a little bit. So I can't yet say that I'm - for example - doing tableau photography in the style of Cindy Sherman or that I'm examining and challenging a gendered caste system in the arts that still reflects gender-based roles in society at large or even that I'm shifting from photojournalism to the documentary photography that's apparently more acceptable in current artistic practice.

In a sense, our assigned readings and discussions in class during our recent AIB residency made matters worse for me. Digesting a work like Frederic Jameson's essay "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" doesn't exactly lead a thinking artist to feel very sanguine about the prospects for a new day for the arts when the author makes statements like "There is another sense in which the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds--they've already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the most unique ones have been thought of already." (132)

A book I read last year called You Are Not a Gadget by the former techno-supremacist turned technology critic Jaron Lanier, had already put me in a similar frame of mind with his repeated demonstration that the destruction of the individual in the "hive mind" of the modern social media of the internet has lead to a culture that is simply rehashing old creative works - not creating anything new. A working musician in addition to being a celebrated computer programmer, Larnier uses his long experience in the music industry to assert that it's not possible to find music created in the last ten years since the rise of social media that's not derivative of music from earlier historical periods. He has issued a public challenge over the last couple of years to find some example that will prove him wrong, but hasn't been appraised of one yet. He says, "I have frequently gone through a conversational sequence along the following lines: Someone in his early twenties will tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, then I'll challenge the person to play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s. I'll ask him to play the tracks for his friends. So far my theory has held: even true fans don't seem to be able to tell if an indy rock track or a dance mix is from 1998 or 2008, for instance." (130)

The Jameson reading drives another nail in the proverbial coffin of any remaining optimism I might have about doing anything new and exciting when he says that postmodernists believe that individualism is no longer possible in the age of corporate capitalism and the organization man.

He continues by discussing “the death of the subject” or “the end of individualism as such”

The great modernisms were, as we have said, predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style.

Yet today, from any number of distinct perspectives, the social theorists, the psychoanalysts, even the linguists, not to speak of those who work in the area of culture and cultural and formal change, are all exploring the notion that that kind of individuality and personal identity is a thing of the past; that the old individual or individualist subject is “dead”; and that might even describe the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological. (131)

He goes on to say that there are two views on these ideas in postmodernist circles. One simply holds that during the rise of competitive capitalism there was such a thing as an individual subject. And no longer. But the more radical view, held by some poststructuralist theorists is that “not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place … this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification …” (132)

This kind of reasoning has come to dominate my thinking about how to proceed with my artwork, or - more to the point - has presented a sea wall of a problematic that I must break myself against, wave-like, until I surmount it or end-run it … or simply devolve onto a derivative stratagem that will doubtless be sufficient to get me a degree. But that will leave me as profoundly dissatisfied and as alienated as when I entered AIB. After all, if everything has been done in the arts - If everything is just rehash and individual authorship is irrelevant and idealism is dead and there is no truth - then why even bother trying to be an artist anymore?

But this is all to the good in a sense. Most of the other readings - while teaching me many interesting facts about art history - weren’t really new to me. Although I didn’t start the MFA program with much formal art training, I did come to Critical Theory I with a significant background of formal training in history, philosophy, sociology, and political science. Plus I’ve been politically active throughout the last quarter century of developments in contemporary art - and I was trained by new leftists who came of age in the bohemian artistic millieu of 1960s. Who were in turn trained by radicals and bohemians who came of age between the 1930s and 1950s.

So, the various works we read on feminist interventions in the art industry, artistic practice and reclaiming art history were absolutely old news to me. Same for queer interventions on those fronts. I was around when the Guerrilla Girls were making their spectacular (and often hilarious) assaults on sexism in the art world. I witnessed the effect that ACT UP and more radical spin-offs like Queer Nation had on the artistic community - devastated as it was by the rise of AIDS. I know a great deal about earlier socialist and communist movements and their strong connection to the modernist avant-garde in the arts. And the signal influence that radical artistic movements had on such political and economic movements.

The one book we read - Mary Anne Staniszewski’s Believing is Seeing - for its part tied up many (relatively) contemporary scholarly ideas on the arts and art history with a nice easy-to-read bow, but again, contained little I hadn’t heard before.

But the Jameson reading really speaks to me. Probably because he is one of the foremost Marxist critics of postmodernism - which is not mentioned in the assigned essay, and was not discussed in Prof. Stuart Steck’s lectures for the Critical Theory I class. I greatly enjoyed the class precisely because it gave me insight into the continued colonization of the art world’s intelligentsia by postmodernist ideology … four decades after seminal works of that ideology were first published. Meaning that postmodernism is now as old or older than the ideas of high modernism were when postmodernism emerged to critique and to some extent supplant it.

Which makes me feel that the art world is more than ready for a change in thinking. Especially because many of the assumptions of postmodernism were built with the belief that multinational capitalism would keep moving forward and strengthening its hold over the planet. But from today’s vantage point, it’s certainly looking like we are seeing a move backwards to an earlier more openly rapacious form of capitalism as that system enters its death throes. Which could make detached irony very much the wrong platform on which to continue to build artistic expression. At least from the perspective of the vast majority of humanity.

Unfortunately, that huge change in material conditions and the crying need for theory that's relevant today is not really in evidence at AIB - at least not during the recent residency. For example, in the second session of the Critical Theory I class, my notes indicate that Steck said that “postmodernism criticizes modernism as utopian,” that its adherents belive there is “no possibility of achieving ideals” and that they seek to “drain art of its utopian drive.” Throughout the four sessions of the course, he would often state en passant by way of reinforcing these ideas that "there is no truth." And that individuals don't matter. And that talent is supposedly not that important anymore in the arts (although I doubt that working artists and art school professors and administrators really believe that). And that, in a sense, works of art don't really matter anymore. Although the process of making the artworks and the concepts behind them (or at least the fact of there being ideas behind artworks) do seem to matter. But I never heard anyone in that class or anywhere else during the residency say "this postmodernism stuff is pretty dated, maybe it's time to move on."

This all just adds to my worry that my participation in the arts may just prove to be pointless. Meaningless. A waste of time. And that perhaps my artistic energies are better spent in other forms of communication and expression. But I have reason to believe that there are serious theoretical problems with that particular reading of postmodernism - and such thinking impels me forward.

Contrasted against the more widely accepted expressions of postmodernist thought evinced above, Jameson's view is a breath of fresh air. Because he is critical of the received wisdom at the core of what I’ve thus far seen of contemporary art theory and scholarship. And because he offers hope to one such as me. Not in the essay we were assigned for Critical Theory I. But instead in his later work, particularly his book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, where he makes the point that postmodernism is not a positive ideology, but merely a symptom of advanced industrial capitalism - often called multinational capitalism or late capitalism.

It is the conclusion to chapter 1 section VI of the work that I find most uplifting. Jameson calls for a return to a political art - an art engaged in the world, and trying to change the world for the better.

This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion.

That statement alone give me a good reason to continue on to develop a coherent body of artistic work, and indicates that the first foundational course that I’ve taken at AIB has had a huge impact on the future direction of that work. In fact, it has given me a project to pursue as an artist. Push back against the easy acceptance of postmodernist ideology in the arts. And do work that points towards some truly new way of acting in the world of late capitalism.

By way of conclusion, an old unattributed situationist slogan springs to mind: In the society that has abolished all adventure, the abolition of that society is the last possible adventure. Or put another way … look out art world, here I come.

Works Cited

Jameson, Frederic, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New Press, 1998. 127-144. Print.